Feeding the People

The Politics of the Potato

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Jun 22 2020 | Archive Date Jun 25 2020

Talking about this book? Use #FeedingthePeople #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

Potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop, yet they were unknown to most of humanity before 1500.

Feeding the People traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere.

The potato's global history reveals the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. It also reminds us that ordinary people make history in ways that continue to shape our lives.

Feeding the People tells the story of how eating became part of statecraft, and provides a new account of the global spread of one of the world's most successful foods.

Potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop, yet they were unknown to most of humanity before 1500.

Feeding the People traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes...


Advance Praise

In following the global travels of the peripatetic potato, Earle brilliantly illuminates both the origins of dietary advice that promised the key to happiness and the everyday ingenuity of farmers and cooks who really do feed the people.

Jeffrey M. Pilcher, author of Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food


If they’re delicious when you choose to eat them, but penitentially bland when you’re told you have to, you may be eating potatoes, which, as Rebecca Earle argues in her brilliant study of the shape-shifting tubers, provided the first taste of the tension between personal freedom and public well-being within the modern state.

Joyce E. Chaplin, author of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius


Potatoes have inspired great books and great recipes. Rebecca Earle describes some unalluring dishes, but her history - cultural, culinary, social, political, and environmental - is the cream of the crop: for coverage, scholarship, breadth and depth of erudition, vividness in exemplification, and fluency in writing no previous work can touch it.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It

In following the global travels of the peripatetic potato, Earle brilliantly illuminates both the origins of dietary advice that promised the key to happiness and the everyday ingenuity of farmers...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781108484060
PRICE $24.95 (USD)

Available on NetGalley

NetGalley Shelf App (PDF)
Send to Kindle (PDF)

Average rating from 19 members


Readers who liked this book also liked: